Category: Memoir Publisher: Real Life Productions
ISBN-10: 0976258900
Pages: 197
Copyright: January 2004
What's it really like to be addicted to heroin and crack cocaine? From the author of scclaimed true life novel Child of Baltimore, Tia L. Lincoln gives us an extraordinarily charged new account of drug addiction, poverty, and the struggle of survival.
Poochie, a bookworm and dreamer, struggles with confusion about her proper place in the world. Then one day, she tries heroin and suddenly sees her path. Her journey of self discovery begins with isolation, extreme restrictions, beatings, group homes, and years of self hatred. It ends with jails, rapes, poverty, and a downward spiral into drug addiction. Freebasing, shooting up, sniffing dope, Poochie has done it all. By the time she is twenty one, she is addicted to heroin and crack cocaine and the mother of four young children. When she comes blasting into a local hospital's emergency room at the age of thirty three, Poochie had destroyed most of her body, mind, and soul beyond repair. She faced a devastating choice, accept that she won't see thirty four or accept the reality of her life and take drastic action.
Junkie - A True Baltimore Story is the powerful, heartbreaking, uncensored story of how a young woman struggles with drug addiction and impossible odds. It's this generation's most honest, eye opening approach about drug dependency and survival in the drug plagued, violent streets of Baltimore.
Excerpt
"Really though, I was like fuck it. This is it. Death cannot possibly be worse than how I feel. I don't have nothing really to live for anymore anyway. Nobody will even notice I'm gone, much less miss me. I mean, I lost all six of my kids and I wasn't keeping in touch with any of them. It's been at least four years since I even laid eyes on them, touched them...
My man is locked up. My mom is locked up. My daddy is dead. My sister is dead. I have no contact with no one im my family anyway. They won't even notice I'm gone.
I haven't eaten real food in so long I don't even remember what a "real meal" consists of. A main course, a starch, a vegetable, what? I don't have a clue anymore. But I do have a hunger that grows inside of me. Oh, I have been starving. Starving for my daily blast and I have done the best I could do to feed that need. It's the only hunger pain raging inside of me, the only one that matters, the only one I listen to, the only one I feed. It's the only need that exists inside of me. It don't matter whether I eat, it don't matter whether i have a place to lay my head at night, it don't matter whether I bathe. I need my blast, fuck everything else.
And I'm tired of sucking dicks for a living. "Trickin" is what we call it. Take for instance this last nigga I was with. I t ricked wit his ass for over a fucking hour and he still ain't pay me shit. Nothing for all that demeaning and disgusting shit I had to do.
God, I'm so tired of this. I'm tired of feeling like an ass all the time. Death cannot be worse that this. I am a junkie, an addict, a fiend, whatever you want to call it and I am worse that i have ever been in my thirty three years of life. If I don't get help, my options are limited to either death or jail or both. My frail body is falling apart and my mind fell apart eons ago. I can't do this anymore. I cannot continue living this way.
I grab the last nickel bag of ready rock I have left and I stuff it way down my jeans pocket. I have no plans at all. I don't care what happens to me and neither does anybody else for that matter. I walk outside and the chill fromt he night doesn't even bother me. I'm used to facing the cold nights alone. I stuff my hands way down deep in my pockets and I start walking. Anywhere. I don't care, just away from here, away from my life, away from myself.
Fuck this, I'm gonna get into a rehad if it kills me, and I mean that literally. I don't wanna die yet. Not like this.
I walk until I end up at University Hospital in downtown Baltimore. I have the ready rock buried deep in my left pocket. In my right pocket, I am carrying my deadly weapon.
A hypodermic needle full of Clorox bleach....
A passionate and poignant memoir written by a woman whose life has been guided by the words: "I am here to learn how to love well." The book is a deep examination of relationships, family, motivation, and honoring of the Self.
(Richard M. Feldman) Ever since I was a young boy, the only thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. I wanted to own and work on a real ranch, with cattle and horses. Especially horses.
While I never became a cowboy, considering everything I have done
Through interviews with Lauren's doctors, along with those of other physicians, researchers, and clinicians who specialize in lung cancer, readers will have a better understanding of the disease.
With the same passion and honesty Lauren exhibite
